Tribute to James Iry

1670: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek developed the first microscope. Microscopes would gain much popularity among academics, as they justified the statement: “This thing is so obvious, can’t you see?”

1859: After an expedition on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin proposed his evolutionary theory. Reviewers at the time were not pleased with the lack of control experiments or a t-test. This criticism happened even though the t-test had not yet been invented.

1865: Through cross-breeding peas found around his monastery, Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of heredity. The institutional review board was not pleased with the non-random selection of peas, or the lack of written consent from the peas. To keep Mendel busy with paperwork and prevent him from making further discoveries, the monastery assigned Mendel to be their dean.

1887: The Pasteur Institute was founded in Paris as an institute dedicated solely to biomedical research. Louis Pasteur greatly hailed the novelty of this institution.

1901: The Rockefeller University was founded in New York as an institute dedicated solely to biomedical research. The Rockefeller Foundation greatly hailed the novelty of this institution.

1930: The United States Congress officially established the National Institutes of Health (NIH). To this day, the NIH remains the top national safety agency, keeping rogue graduate students out of gangs and terrorist organizations.

1950s: Fritz Albert Lipmann and Hans Adolf Krebs discovered the mitochondria. When people complained about the complexity of its name, Lipmann would appease the hecklers by explaining, “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, what’s the problem?”

1954: James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix structure of DNA. Due to a post-war depletion of reviewers and papers, the resulting publication by Watson and Crick was not peer reviewed and consisted of only one page.

1957: Heinrich Schnitger invented a bed that flips itself over every two hours. Unsatisfied with the amount of sleep-deprived nights it created, he invented the micropipette.1985: Kary Mullis invented polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. Later historians would suspect that “95-60-65” were merely lottery ticket numbers shouted out by Mullis in a frenzy and misinterpreted as temperatures to the reaction by his assistant.